The Known World (2 page)

Henry said, “No. Best save the singin for some other time, darlin.” What he wanted was to love her, to get up from the sickbed and walk under his own power and take his wife to the bed they had been happy in all their married days. When he died, late the evening of the seventh day, Fern Elston would be with Caldonia in his death room. “I always thought you did right in marrying him,” Fern would say, in the first stages of grief for Henry, a former student. After the War between the States, Fern would tell a pamphlet writer, a white immigrant from Canada, that Henry had been the brightest of her students, someone she would have taught for free. Loretta, Caldonia’s maid, would be there as well when Henry died, but she would be silent. She merely closed her master’s eyes after a time and covered his face with a quilt, a Christmas present from three slave women who had made it in fourteen days.

Moses walked the lane of the quarters down to his cabin, the one nearest the house where his master and mistress lived. Next to Moses’s cabin, Elias sat on a damp tree stump before his own cabin, whittling a piece of pinewood that would be the body of a doll he was making for his daughter. It was the first thing he had ever given her. He had a lamp hanging from a nail beside his door but the light had been failing and he was as close to working blind as a body could get. But his daughter and his two sons, one only thirteen months old, were heaven and earth to him and somehow the knife cut into the pinewood in just the right way and began what would be the doll’s right eye.

Moses, a few feet before passing Elias, said, “You gotta meet that mule in the mornin.”

“I know,” Elias said. Moses had not stopped walking. “I ain’t hurtin a soul here,” Elias said. “Just fixin on some wood.” Now Moses stopped and said, “I ain’t carin if you fixin God’s throne. I said you gotta meet that mule in the mornin. That mule sleepin right now, so maybe you should follow after him.” Elias said nothing and he did not move. Moses said, “I ain’t but two minutes off you, fella, and you seem to wanna keep forgettin that.” Moses had found Elias a great bother in the mind from the day Henry Townsend drove up with Elias from the slave market, a one-day affair held out in the open twice a year at the eastern edge of the town of Manchester, in the spring and in the fall after harvest. The very day Elias was bought by Henry some white people had talked about building a permanent structure for the slave market—that was the year it rained every spring day the market was held, and many white people caught colds as a result. One woman died of pneumonia. But God was generous with his blessings the following fall and each day was perfect for buying and selling slaves and not a soul said anything about constructing a permanent place, so fine was the roof God himself had provided for the market.

Now Moses said to Elias, “If you ain’t waitin for me here when the sun come up, not even Massa Henry will save you.” Moses continued on to his cabin. Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn’t fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

With one foot Elias swept the shavings from his other foot and started whittling again. The right leg of the doll was giving him trouble: he wanted the figure to be running but he had not been able to get the knee to bend just right. Someone seeing it might think it was just a doll standing still, and he didn’t want that. He was afraid that if the knee did not bend soon he would have to start again with a new piece of wood. Finding a good piece would be hard. But then the right leg of his own wife, Celeste, did not bend the way it should either, so maybe in the long run it might not matter with the doll. Celeste had been limping from the first step she took into the world.

Moses went into his cabin and met the darkness and a dead hearth. Outside, the light of Elias’s lamp leaned this way and that and then it dimmed even more. Elias had never believed in a sane God and so had never questioned a world where colored people could be the owners of slaves, and if at that moment, in the near dark, he had sprouted wings, he would not have questioned that either. He would simply have gone on making the doll. Inside Elias’s cabin his crippled wife and three children slept and the hearth had enough embers to last the night, which promised to be cold again. Elias left the doll’s right leg alone and returned to the head, which he already thought was as perfect as anything he had seen made by a man. He had gotten better since carving the first comb for his wife Celeste. He wanted to attach corn silk to the doll’s head but the kind of dark silk he wanted would not be ready until early fall. Immature silk would have to do.

Moses was not hungry and so did not complain to his wife or the boy about the darkness. He lay down on the straw pallet beside his wife, Priscilla. Their son was on the other side of her, snoring. Priscilla watched her husband as he slowly drifted into sleep, and once he was asleep, she took hold of his hand and put it to her face and smelled all of the outside world that he had brought in with him and then she tried to find sleep herself.

That last day, the day Henry Townsend died, Fern Elston returned early in a buggy driven by a sixty-five-year-old slave her husband had inherited from his father.

Fern and Caldonia spent a few hours in the parlor, drinking a milk-and-honey brew Caldonia’s mother was fond of making. Upstairs during that time, Zeddie, the cook, and then Loretta, Caldonia’s maid, sat with Henry. About seven in the evening, Caldonia told Fern she had best go on to bed, but Fern had not been sleeping well and she told Caldonia they might as well sit together with Henry. Fern had been a teacher not only to Caldonia but to her twin brother as well. There were not that many free educated women in Manchester County to pass her time with and so Fern had made a friend of a woman who, as a girl, had found too much to giggle about in the words of William Shakespeare.

The two women went up about eight and Caldonia told Loretta she would call her if she needed her and Loretta nodded and went out and down to her small room at the end of the hall. The three, Fern and Henry and Caldonia, started in talking about the Virginia heat and the way it wore away a body. Henry had seen North Carolina once and thought Virginia’s heat could not compare. That last evening was relatively cool again. Henry had not had to change the nightclothes he had put on at six. About nine he fell asleep and woke not long after. His wife and Fern were discussing a Thomas Gray poem. He thought he knew the one they were talking about but as he formed some words to join the conversation, death stepped into the room and came to him: Henry walked up the steps and into the tiniest of houses, knowing with each step that he did not own it, that he was only renting. He was ever so disappointed; he heard footsteps behind him and death told him it was Caldonia, coming to register her own disappointment. Whoever was renting the house to him had promised a thousand rooms, but as he traveled through the house he found less than four rooms, and all the rooms were identical and his head touched their ceilings. “This will not do,” Henry kept saying to himself, and he turned to share that thought with his wife, to say, “Wife, wife, look what they done done,” and God told him right then, “Not a wife, Henry, but a widow.”

It was several minutes before Caldonia and Fern knew Henry was no more and they went on talking about a widowed white woman with two slaves to her name on a farm in some distant part of Virginia, in a place near Montross where her nearest white neighbors were miles and miles away. The news of the young woman, Elizabeth Marson, was more than one year old but it was only now reaching the people of Manchester County, so the women in the room with dead Henry spoke as if it had all happened to Elizabeth just that morning. After the white woman’s husband died, her slaves, Mirtha and Destiny, had taken over and kept the woman prisoner for months, working her ragged with only a few hours rest each day until her hair turned white and her pores sweated blood. Caldonia said she understood that Mirtha and Destiny had been sold to try to compensate Elizabeth, to settle her away from that farm with its memories, but Fern said she understood that the slave women had been killed by the law. When Elizabeth was finally rescued, she did not remember that she was supposed to be the owner, and it was a long time before she could be taught that again. Caldonia, noticing her husband’s stillness, went to him. She gave a cry as she shook him. Loretta came in silently and took a hand mirror from atop the dresser. It seemed to Caldonia as she watched Loretta place the mirror under Henry’s nose that he had only stepped away and that if she called loudly enough to him, put her mouth quite close to his ear, and called loud enough for any slave in the quarters to hear, he might turn back and be her husband again. She took Henry’s hand in both of hers and put it to her cheek. It was warm, she noticed, thinking there might yet be enough life in it for him to reconsider. Caldonia was twenty-eight years old and she was childless.

Alice, the woman without a mind who had watched Moses be with himself in the woods, had been Henry and Caldonia’s property for some six months the night he died. From the first week, Alice had started going about the land in the night, singing and talking to herself and doing things that sometimes made the hair on the backs of the slave patrollers’ necks stand up. She spit at and slapped their horses for saying untrue things about her to her neighbors, especially to Elias’s youngest, “a little bitty boy” she told the patrollers she planned to marry after the harvest. She grabbed the patrollers’ crotches and begged them to dance away with her because her intended was forever pretending he didn’t know who she was. She called the white men by made-up names and gave them the day and time God would take them to heaven, would drag each and every member of their families across the sky and toss them into hell with no more thought than a woman dropping strawberries into a cup of cream.

In those first days after Henry bought Alice, the patrollers would haul her back to Henry’s plantation, waking him and Caldonia as one of them rode up on the porch and pounded on the black man’s front door with the butt of a pistol. “Your property out here loose and you just sleepin like everything’s fine and dandy,” they shouted to him, a giggling Alice sprawled before them in the dirt after they had run her back. “Come down here and find out about your property.” Henry would come down and explain again that no one, not even his overseer, had been able to keep her from roaming. Moses had suggested tying her down at night, but Caldonia would not have it. Alice was nothing to worry about, Henry said to the patrollers, coming down the steps in his nightclothes and helping Alice up from the ground. She just had half a mind, he said, but other than that she was a good worker, never saying to the two or three white patrollers who owned no slaves that a woman of half a mind had been so much cheaper to buy than one with a whole mind. Two hundred and twenty-eight dollars and two bushels of apples not good enough to eat and only so-so enough for a cider that was bound to set someone’s teeth on edge. The patrollers would soon ride away. “This is what happens,” they said among themselves back on the road, “when you give niggers the same rights as a white man.”

Toward the middle of her third week as Henry and Caldonia’s property, the patrollers got used to seeing Alice wander about and she became just another fixture in the patrollers’ night, worthy of no more attention than a hooting owl or a rabbit hopping across the road. Sometimes, when the patrollers had tired of their own banter or when they anticipated getting their pay from Sheriff John Skiffington, they would sit their horses and make fun of her as she sang darky songs in the road. This show was best when the moon was at its brightest, shining down on them and easing their fear of the night and of a mad slave woman and lighting up Alice as she danced to the songs. The moon gave more life to her shadow, and the shadow would bounce about with her from one side of the road to other, calming the horses and quieting the crickets. But when they suffered ill humor, or the rain poured down and wetted them and their threadbare clothes, and their horses were skittish and the skin down to their feet itched, then they heaped curse words upon her. Over time, over those six months after Henry bought Alice, the patrollers heard from other white people that a crazy Negro slave in the night was akin to a two-headed chicken, or a crowing hen. Bad luck. Very bad luck, so it was best to try to keep the cussing to themselves.

The rainy evening her master Henry died Alice again stepped out of the cabin she shared with Delphie and Delphie’s daughter, Cassandra. Delphie was nearing forty-four years old and believed that God had greater dangers in store for everybody than a colored woman gone insane, which was what she told her daughter, who was at first afraid of Alice. Alice came out that evening and saw Elias standing at his door with the whittling knife and the pinewood in his hands, waiting for the rain to end. “Come on with me,” she sang to Elias. “You just come on with me now. Come on, boy.” Elias ignored her.

After she came back from watching Moses in the patch of woods, Alice went back down the lane and out to the road. The muddy road gave her a hard way but she kept on. Once on the road, she veered away from Henry’s place and began to chant, even more loudly than when she was on her master’s land.

Lifting the front of her frock for the moon and all to see, she shimmied in the road and chanted with all her might:

I met a dead man layin in Massa lane

Ask that dead man what his name

He raised he bony head and took off his hat

He told me this, he told me that.